Because people have been convinced that rebooting constantly is a necessity, and therefore experience startup times often... Those of us who just leave machines running, or suspend them, are largely unconcerned with startup times so long as the program remains running.
Artificial scarcity is in the producer's interest, to get higher prices... Unless the price becomes completely ridiculous, they will be able to sell all the oil they produce, so sell it for the highest possible price.
Instead of small scale solar deployments on people's rooftops, it would make sense to build huge solar arrays on desert land that is otherwise worthless. While it would in the long term make sense for every house to have a roof made of solar panels, in the short term that money would be better spent building larger more efficient solar plants in areas with lots of sun and no other use.
Linux is generally faster than windows... Wine is sometimes faster than XP and usually faster than Vista... It does depend on the drivers tho, ATI's binary drivers suck, but Nvidia's beat their windows counterparts by a small margin.
Or you could convert it to opendocument and use one of the open source spreadsheets that you could modify to your need, or write a utility to parse the file directly using the specs which have been available for several years now... You can even use one of the pre written libraries for manipulating opendocument files.
Moore's law increases complexity and performance, but what happens to the superceded hardware? It gets considered obsolete, and becomes available very cheaply. End users don't have cutting edge hardware, the likes of IBM and Cray use that to build supercomputers.
But Linux is not new, it's an implementation of unix which predates windows by many years.
The issue is not that linux is well implemented, but rather that the unix apis are well designed such that it is possible to create a good modern implementation. Windows on the other hand is poorly designed, and as it's been updated has gained layers and layers of cruft and unnecessary complexity.
That's a really crufty, bloated and overly complicated way of doing things...
That's the problem with windows, it has multiple layers of cruft all over the place resulting in something that is extremely complex and difficult to maintain or debug. That's why vista took so long to develop, far too much complexity tied together in all kinds of different ways, if you change one small part you have to throughly test all the things it interacts with.
It comes from not having a clean, forward thinking modular design in the first place... It's always been about making it run, then shipping it out the door, never any thought for future needs.
And yet the underlying unix-like API on OSX is largely unchanged since the 70s..
What annoys me tho, is "windows mobile" which is advertised as "running windows on your phone"... Only it's not that at all, you can't just take your desktop apps and run them on your phone, and you can't even recompile them without significant work.
By contrast, the iphone is advertised as a unique and separate device (which it is), although it has better compatibility with osx than windows does with it's mobile counterpart... Many CLI based apps will compile easily on the unofficial iphone sdk, most changes that are needed are for the interface, and such changes would be required anyway simply to cope with the small display size and different method of user interaction.
Incidentally, you *can* run classic apps, but you need a full blown emulation environment running a copy of OS9... By this point tho, even with the overhead of emulation the performance is still comparable to or better than native performance at the time these older apps were written.
If there wasn't the need to emulate an entire processor, then the performance would be considerably better too.
2000 failed to capture the home market, people stuck to 98... so they came out with ME that was complete garbage to convince people they should abandon the 9x range, and when XP came out they could compare it very favorably with ME.
By contrast, 2000 compared to 98 for most people was just slower...
Modern OS's do sandboxing already, ie running everything in its own memory space with copy-on-write shared libs, and no write access to the kernel space or other apps. It helps stability a lot compared to the older OS's with a flat memory space, but it hinders performance too. AmigaOS ran in a flat memory space, and was very fast, but one program could easily crash the whole system. On the other hand, the inherent instability forced app developers to write decent code instead of relying on the OS to bail them out.
As for wine, it's not so much further abstracted, as abstracted in a different way. Your not running windows game on top of windows on top of linux (ala vmware) as the quote suggests, your running windows game on top of wine on top of linux... Which is really no different than running the game on top of win32 on top of NTKRNL. If the code implementing wine is more efficient than the code implementing win32 on top of NT, or if the linux kernel does things more efficiently than NT, or if your drivers do their work more efficiently, then the linux/wine combination can be faster. If you look just at the kernel level, windows has far more complexity relative to linux, all that added complexity comes at a performance price.
The trouble with NT, was that the OS was designed to be mostly compatible, and therefore brought a lot of cruft along with it right from the start...
Apple on the other hand stripped the cruft and sandboxed it...
Were microsoft to do the same as apple, it would hit them very hard... The "new" microsoft os would be little different from running mac or linux with a vm running an older instance of windows, only it would be new and untested with a poor selection of apps. It's likely that a significant number of linux migrations would occur, probably enough to reach a tipping point.
If it reaches the point that linux has the same or better compatibility with the apps, hardware and files that people want to use, then it becomes virtually impossible to justify the cost of windows, just like it became impossible to justify the cost of sco unix when linux ran the same apps on the same hardware for a fraction of the cost.
Well, i don't use 6to4, i have native ipv6 transit... The airport extreme has a v6 address, but it doesn't route any traffic because its just bridging onto my lan... I've never tried what other v6 capability it has, but there were some options last i looked.
It's hard to see how anyone expects cost cutting vendors to implement ipv6 into inexpensive routers while there is very little demand, very few sites available via v6, and very few isps providing service to consumers.
Then Cisco is about your only option... I use a 1701 for my ADSL, and i have native IPv6 provided by the ISP. The airport extreme sits behind the router, it doesn't route ipv6 in my setup, it just has an ipv6 address itself.
Try NX, http://www.nomachine.com/ It's orders of magnitude faster than VNC or native X11, and supports persistent sessions as you describe... It also runs over SSH, so it benefits from the inherent security of SSH.
I would never even consider using VNC, entirely pointless... slower than native X11.
DOS wasn't the breakthrough... The fact that the hardware was capable of running the same software (that includes DOS) was the breakthrough.
It's not like you had multiple versions of DOS for multiple incompatible types of hardware that let you run the same software, maybe you're thinking of Java?
It was not microsoft who did that however... It was IBM by basing their hardware design on off the shelf parts... Dos was just one of many components.
Basically the hardware opened up, but the software remained closed. That was a good first step since hardware used to account for the majority of the cost, but now we've had open hardware for a few years and it's about time software went the same way. MS just rode the wave of open hardware, and their actions managed to largely go unnoticed.
When it inevitably happens, software will fall a lot further than hardware did, simply because the barrier for entry and general costs are a lot lower.
It's no longer possible for IBM for extract a monopoly rent on hardware, in a few years time it will no longer be possible for MS to do the same with software.
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Because people have been convinced that rebooting constantly is a necessity, and therefore experience startup times often...
Those of us who just leave machines running, or suspend them, are largely unconcerned with startup times so long as the program remains running.
Artificial scarcity is in the producer's interest, to get higher prices...
Unless the price becomes completely ridiculous, they will be able to sell all the oil they produce, so sell it for the highest possible price.
Instead of small scale solar deployments on people's rooftops, it would make sense to build huge solar arrays on desert land that is otherwise worthless.
While it would in the long term make sense for every house to have a roof made of solar panels, in the short term that money would be better spent building larger more efficient solar plants in areas with lots of sun and no other use.
People usually open the curtains during the day, and close them at night...
The same can be said for AIM in the US and MSN in parts of Europe...
It's disturbing, and a problem, all these disconnected networks.
What I never understood, is why people who are short of food have loads of kids?
You can't feed yourself, so you create more mouths to feed?
China has a policy of one child per family, that's a good idea...
Maybe if copper becomes expensive enough it might actually push telcos who own thousands of miles worth of copper cabling to replace them with fibre.
Linux is generally faster than windows... Wine is sometimes faster than XP and usually faster than Vista...
It does depend on the drivers tho, ATI's binary drivers suck, but Nvidia's beat their windows counterparts by a small margin.
And they will make even more money by making even more mess, why would they bother cleaning it up?
Or you could convert it to opendocument and use one of the open source spreadsheets that you could modify to your need, or write a utility to parse the file directly using the specs which have been available for several years now... You can even use one of the pre written libraries for manipulating opendocument files.
Weren't they forced to release those specs by the EU?
Moore's law increases complexity and performance, but what happens to the superceded hardware?
It gets considered obsolete, and becomes available very cheaply. End users don't have cutting edge hardware, the likes of IBM and Cray use that to build supercomputers.
But Linux is not new, it's an implementation of unix which predates windows by many years.
The issue is not that linux is well implemented, but rather that the unix apis are well designed such that it is possible to create a good modern implementation.
Windows on the other hand is poorly designed, and as it's been updated has gained layers and layers of cruft and unnecessary complexity.
That's a really crufty, bloated and overly complicated way of doing things...
That's the problem with windows, it has multiple layers of cruft all over the place resulting in something that is extremely complex and difficult to maintain or debug. That's why vista took so long to develop, far too much complexity tied together in all kinds of different ways, if you change one small part you have to throughly test all the things it interacts with.
It comes from not having a clean, forward thinking modular design in the first place... It's always been about making it run, then shipping it out the door, never any thought for future needs.
And yet the underlying unix-like API on OSX is largely unchanged since the 70s..
What annoys me tho, is "windows mobile" which is advertised as "running windows on your phone"... Only it's not that at all, you can't just take your desktop apps and run them on your phone, and you can't even recompile them without significant work.
By contrast, the iphone is advertised as a unique and separate device (which it is), although it has better compatibility with osx than windows does with it's mobile counterpart... Many CLI based apps will compile easily on the unofficial iphone sdk, most changes that are needed are for the interface, and such changes would be required anyway simply to cope with the small display size and different method of user interaction.
Incidentally, you *can* run classic apps, but you need a full blown emulation environment running a copy of OS9...
By this point tho, even with the overhead of emulation the performance is still comparable to or better than native performance at the time these older apps were written.
If there wasn't the need to emulate an entire processor, then the performance would be considerably better too.
And the risk of that happening is a very good reason for you to move anything of importance away from proprietary formats as quickly as possible.
2000 failed to capture the home market, people stuck to 98... so they came out with ME that was complete garbage to convince people they should abandon the 9x range, and when XP came out they could compare it very favorably with ME.
By contrast, 2000 compared to 98 for most people was just slower...
Modern OS's do sandboxing already, ie running everything in its own memory space with copy-on-write shared libs, and no write access to the kernel space or other apps. It helps stability a lot compared to the older OS's with a flat memory space, but it hinders performance too. AmigaOS ran in a flat memory space, and was very fast, but one program could easily crash the whole system. On the other hand, the inherent instability forced app developers to write decent code instead of relying on the OS to bail them out.
As for wine, it's not so much further abstracted, as abstracted in a different way. Your not running windows game on top of windows on top of linux (ala vmware) as the quote suggests, your running windows game on top of wine on top of linux... Which is really no different than running the game on top of win32 on top of NTKRNL. If the code implementing wine is more efficient than the code implementing win32 on top of NT, or if the linux kernel does things more efficiently than NT, or if your drivers do their work more efficiently, then the linux/wine combination can be faster.
If you look just at the kernel level, windows has far more complexity relative to linux, all that added complexity comes at a performance price.
The trouble with NT, was that the OS was designed to be mostly compatible, and therefore brought a lot of cruft along with it right from the start...
Apple on the other hand stripped the cruft and sandboxed it...
Were microsoft to do the same as apple, it would hit them very hard... The "new" microsoft os would be little different from running mac or linux with a vm running an older instance of windows, only it would be new and untested with a poor selection of apps. It's likely that a significant number of linux migrations would occur, probably enough to reach a tipping point.
If it reaches the point that linux has the same or better compatibility with the apps, hardware and files that people want to use, then it becomes virtually impossible to justify the cost of windows, just like it became impossible to justify the cost of sco unix when linux ran the same apps on the same hardware for a fraction of the cost.
Well, i don't use 6to4, i have native ipv6 transit... The airport extreme has a v6 address, but it doesn't route any traffic because its just bridging onto my lan... I've never tried what other v6 capability it has, but there were some options last i looked.
It's hard to see how anyone expects cost cutting vendors to implement ipv6 into inexpensive routers while there is very little demand, very few sites available via v6, and very few isps providing service to consumers.
Then Cisco is about your only option...
I use a 1701 for my ADSL, and i have native IPv6 provided by the ISP. The airport extreme sits behind the router, it doesn't route ipv6 in my setup, it just has an ipv6 address itself.
Try NX, http://www.nomachine.com/
It's orders of magnitude faster than VNC or native X11, and supports persistent sessions as you describe...
It also runs over SSH, so it benefits from the inherent security of SSH.
I would never even consider using VNC, entirely pointless... slower than native X11.
DOS wasn't the breakthrough...
The fact that the hardware was capable of running the same software (that includes DOS) was the breakthrough.
It's not like you had multiple versions of DOS for multiple incompatible types of hardware that let you run the same software, maybe you're thinking of Java?
It was not microsoft who did that however...
It was IBM by basing their hardware design on off the shelf parts... Dos was just one of many components.
Basically the hardware opened up, but the software remained closed. That was a good first step since hardware used to account for the majority of the cost, but now we've had open hardware for a few years and it's about time software went the same way. MS just rode the wave of open hardware, and their actions managed to largely go unnoticed.
When it inevitably happens, software will fall a lot further than hardware did, simply because the barrier for entry and general costs are a lot lower.
It's no longer possible for IBM for extract a monopoly rent on hardware, in a few years time it will no longer be possible for MS to do the same with software.